SCO UnixWare 7.1.3 Review

JigSaw writes "Despite news about SCO being all about the lawsuit, they still sell OS products and they have a presence in the server market. UnixWare is one of these OS products. Tony Bourke reviewed its latest version, 7.1.3, and even includes benchmarks among other tests. Tony concludes that 'the lack of commercial applications and user community, the difficulty with open source applications, the SCO litigation, and the high price are all marks against UnixWare. There are just very few reasons to adopt UnixWare as your platform, and plenty of reasons to adopt (or migrate to) other platforms.'"

Comments

it was an objective review

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the author did fairly well at remaining objective and testing the product without allowing company ethics cloud his review

This may hurt them the most...

[wrinkledshirt]

Of all the bad PR that they've generated for themselves, a bad product may hurt them the most. Now, they open themselves up to the counter-attack that they're an untalented software company looking for a quick buck, with the product being proof of their lack of talent. It's an oversimplification, sure, but one they pretty richly deserve.

Re:Unfortunate that the test system wasn't newer

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Application vendors are dropping support for SCO right and left, so really, the level of hardware support is irrelevant.

I find it hard to believe that any company that has made the dire mistake of tying themselves so closely to SCO as a platform would not be actively investigating any possible option to remove themselves from any involvement at all with a clearly doomed company.

Their product is worthless, and their user base is so miniscule as to make it counter productive to expend the cash required to qualify product against SCO.

And the more that happens, the worse it will get for those who persist.

What good is an OS distribution when no one makes applications for it anymore, and those that did DROP support for it completely, because it's cheaper to lose a miniscule number of customers than to spend time and money supporting the OS they use?

Benchmarks?

[molo]

The only benchmarks run were comparing OpenSSL computation in native UnixWare mode versus Linux Kernel Personality (LKP) mode. This is an extremely poor test and shows that the reviewer doesn't know what he's talking about.

LKP is basicly system call emulation like that which is available in FreeBSD. This has NOTHING to do with pure user-space number crunching required of crypto computations! This kind of test would only show the most eggregrarious scheduling or interrupt handler errors in providing the LKP functionality. This wouldn't (shouldn't?) even show up any compiler differences between UnixWare's cc and GCC since OpenSSL is heavily assembly optimzed on x86.

These numbers arn't even compared to running under a real Linux kernel, which would be the most logical course of action given the reviewer's incomplete understanding.

But regardless, with comments like the following, it becomes painfully obvious the reviewer knows little about this:

The Linux kernel version number piqued my interest, because of the recent kernel vulnerability responsible for the compromise of some Debian project servers. I'm not sure if the same kernel exploit would work in the LKP, but it'd be an interesting test.

If anything, benchmarking system calls should have been done. Something along the lines of these tests.

The reviewer makes his bias very plain with passages such as:

I want to be as objective as possible, but I'd be a fool to think such a review could possibly avoid the controversy and raw emotions surrounding the company offering the product I've chosen to evaluate.

This combined with the lack of objective and useful benchmarks makes this article little more than a piece of cheerleading propoganda.

-molo

Re:wtf???

[Anonymous Coward]

It supports SATA and IDE RAID, but the drivers aren't there for a lot of controllers. You could say that's hardly support at all, but by that logic you could also say because Linux doesn't support Brand X video card, Linux doesn't support graphics.

There's a difference between driver support and feature support. Linux supports these features. Drivers, as usual, depend on vendor specs, vendor support, and ease of reverse-engineering.